Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (40 page)

Not all is dark in Defoe's
Journal,
however, since the author is equally intrigued by the scattered instances of ingenuity and exodus to which these penitential arrangements give rise. One recognizes the author
of Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders
in the beguiling story of the exploits of the joiner, the baker, and the sailor as they put their wits together and escape London, facing armed opposition and hostility in the countryside wherever they go. Their pluck, their feistiness and survival-ist stratagems, their art in fooling others so as to create breathing space

and maneuvering room, their ability to work together and to bring others onto their side, their "lifemanship" along straight artisanal as well as philosophical lines, speak for Defoe's deepest values, and announce his faith in the little man's resources when pitted against overwhelming odds. Here is his best answer against quarantine, the exercise of human freedom and creativity, even the making of community. Ultimately, as Defoe well knows from his eighteenth-century vantage point, this plague did not destroy London, and even though he wants to warn about the plague currently ravaging Provence, he is at pains to show how many English citizens rose to the challenge in 1665, not merely by not dying but by devising countertactics of their own.

Nonetheless, just as
Robinson Crusoe
is haunted by the threat of cannibalism and the still darker threat of solipsism and paranoia, so too is the
Journal
stamped by the sweep and even majesty of death. One feels that the onslaught and spectacle of massive dying engages Defoe
as writer,
and that he pulls out all the stops in order to capture these horrible events, producing something of a mixed media work that combines lists, schedules, archival notations, along with close, even daring upfront observations, and more distant reflections, both moral and philosophical. Hence, the narrator, cool and cautious though he is, is mesmerized by much of what he sees, and experiences a kind of siren call, an irresistible urgency to go to the scene of the crime whenever he can, regardless of personal danger or the injunctions of martial law. As noted, he simply must see, with his own eyes, the infamous pits where the dead bodies are delivered, piled up into huge mounds, and then covered with lime. And his visit to this ghastly place, done surreptitiously at night, seems a kind of descent into the underworld, an encounter with mass death and physiological decay, possessed of a starkness and scale that reminds a modern reader of the first accounts of concentration camps or the more recent ones of political massacres and dug-up grave sites.

This new regime has a startling kind of clarity, and one's relations

with life and death, with self and other, are reconceived. It is in this sense that Defoe is far more than the note-taking journalist he sometimes appears, because at key moments in his best work, the world suddenly opens up and out, becomes at once larger and more transparent. Here is where metaphysics crashes into the author's pedestrian scheme, and the long view comes into focus. Sickness and death are entries as well as exits, thresholds leading to a radically altered sense of self and world.

Such a vision can have close parallels with the established views of the Church, but it is an index of Defoe's unbribable honesty that he ultimately parts ways with any Utopian or doctrinal reading of the plague; we see this most sharply in the book's final pages where the author measures the brevity of London's spiritual transformation and acknowledges that the new dispensation brought about by a glimpse into the beyond is not a lasting phenomenon, but rather a temporary state of affairs. Soon enough the opaqueness, discord, and vice of everyday London life returns to the scene. As for the genesis of the plague or the reasons for its cessation, Defoe remains suspicious of all human intervention and interpretation, claiming that God alone is answerable here. This invocation of the divine may well be the exit perspective of
A Journal of the Plague Tear,
but it cannot be said to govern the narrative itself, and we read this book with interest today because it maps out, with great precision, how a huge, secular metropolis comes to terms with massive sickness and death. Defoe's book does honor to the resources of municipal order and medicine, and he makes us realize what it looks like when a bustling modern city is paralyzed, laid low.

But plague itself will be ultimately remembered here as the great
met-teur en scene,
the cathartic agent that recasts human doing in shocking ways. Defoe's eyes are focused on the vital but insufficient resources of civic order, and he measures with fascination the equally vital but insufficient resources of the human subject. Ultimately, the behavior of the ants interests him more than the structure of the anthill, so to speak, be-

cause he sees in these sometimes creative, sometimes manic explosions of energy and will a precious record of human potential, revealed in both its hideousness and its resilience. Without ever being told, we nonetheless learn that the authorities' policies of quarantine and sequestration were profoundly ineffective and wrongheaded because the living will not be corralled in this manner and because the presence of plague in close quarters—the city, especially the family—catalyzes unheard-of human energies beyond the reach and control of any penal or monitoring system. In this regard, the Foucauldian reading of the
Journal,
with its emphasis on the State's disciplinary practices, gets Defoe right yet backward. One may say, in conclusion, that
A Journal of the Plague Year
is one of our premier descriptions of a city in crisis, arguably valid for numerous decimated cities—Pompei, Hiroshima, Dresden—whose sagas have not been told. But plague is not a volcanic eruption, atom bomb, or fire; deadly infection adds a unique narrative and relational complexity to these grim matters, and no amount of medical advances is likely to make Defoe a dated figure.

On the contrary, Defoe is more than ever our contemporary. His discussion of the paranoia engendered by plague, communicable disease, and above all the invisibility of infection is rich in lessons for our time. Defoe speaks of the anxiety that beset Londoners, of the epistemologi-cal horror show that urban life had become. And he also speaks of the origins of plague: human connection, but also trade, exchange, circulation of goods and of people. It is entirely to the point that H.F. discusses England's altered image among other European nations, noting the Europeans' frightened conviction that all English goods are contaminated, noting also their shrewd business sense that such convictions may also improve the Europeans' own bottom line. Reading
A Journal of the Plague Year
in a time not only of AIDS, but also of paranoia concerning mad cow disease, hoof-and-mouth disease, genetically altered grain and foodstuffs for export/import, even smallpox and anthrax—and the furious waves of anxiety and suspicion that accompany these contemporary developments—we may well feel that Defoe saw it all coming.

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN

THE STATE OF ENGLAND: CHARLES DICKENS

London does not experience plague during the nineteenth century, and yet Dickens's
Bleak House
demands consideration as one of literature's most powerful and far-reaching accounts of a city threatened by disease, particularly smallpox and typhus, and more generally in the form of a blight that ranges from filth and pollution to brutal socioeconomic conditions. In the neighborhood of eight hundred pages long, this elephantine novel puts off many readers by dint of its sheer bulk, and I have firsthand experience with the uphill battle of getting either students or friends to tackle it. Moreover, Dickensian English—garrulous, slow paced, relishing the syntactical and semantic scope of a leisurely and expansive nineteenth-century literary idiom—is a hard sell today. This is a great pity, because the stupendous fireworks that Dickens routinely pulls off depend entirely on the portentous equipment he is using; not unlike the amount of power necessary to get a 747 or an airbus off the ground, Dickensian plots use a lot of fuel, but they are something to behold when they are airborne. You may still feel that other craft go faster, or that you prefer sleeker, trimmer vehicles, but if the job consists of getting an entire small city into the sky, or an entire large city into language, Dickens is unbeatable. And for our purposes of illuminating the dimensionality of plague, the scale and reach of his fiction are of paramount importance.

In
Bleak House
(which I take to be the author's supreme work) plague comes packaged in its more modern and invisible form: the off-limits slums and ghettos where disease flourishes. Dickens makes us realize that the central slum of the novel, Tom-all-Alone's, albeit shrouded in obscurity and unknown to most London dwellers, is utterly luminous as a kind of barometer for measuring the weather of midcentury Victorian society at large. Like Sophocles, Dickens is drawn to issues of sexual secrets and transgressions, as well as to the threat of social slippage and blurred class lines. His novel resembles the Greek play via its insis-

tent redefinition of family / community and its view of disease as overarching metaphor for denied connections and concealed linkages. Ultimately, Sophocles is Dickens's mentor in the exploration of identity, the reconfiguring of Oedipus' relations and origin as the mystery of the motherless Esther Summerson's birth. I want to suggest that the story of a diseased community inevitably reconfigures the individual subject's self-definition, even though "scientific" thinking would hardly posit this connection. Yet, such larger ramifications are, in some sense, precisely what literature brings to the table.

Bleak House
opens with a memorable depiction of London fog, and one cannot fail to see that Dickens's entire story takes place under the aegis of fog, impaired visibility. And it is not far-fetched to posit fog—perceptual and epistemological murk—as a generic feature of the plague-text, something that runs through the genre, as seen in the blindness-sight motifs that Tiresias brings to the
Oedipus
and in the dreadful uncertainty of Defoe's Londoners as to whether they or their kin are infected, as seen in evidence in the mystery surrounding Esther Summerson's birth and all the other mysteries of
Bleak House,
and conspicuously seen even in a filmic version of these matters, Polanski's
Chinatown,
where we are repeatedly told that Chinatown is the place where you don't know who is who. The Sophoclean legacy of hidden linkages is most easily read in Dickens as a vital critique of Victorian facade, so that the drama of illegitimacy that drives the Dedlock plot and exposes the aristocratic Lady Dedlock as the orphan Esther's mother, is Dickens's way of bringing the skeletons out of the closet. A good chunk of nineteenth-century British fiction is cued to this exposure of sexual secrets, and no one surpasses Dickens in his genius for exploiting the sleuthing energies released by such a plot.

But these matters are immeasurably thickened and broadened when we factor infectious disease into this whodunit formula. There is something rotten in London, and the famous fog is also to be understood, more directly, as pollution and material filth—as real dirt in real air— every bit as much as a symbol for blindness. Pollution is a remarkably

precise term for
Bleak House
because it too announces the slippage of boundaries, in particular the boundary between inside and outside, so that the germs in the air do not remain there but come into people's lungs and minds to work their spells on the inside. Like Sophocles' play with its incestuously linked figures, Dickens's novel is radically ecological, but whereas the Greek playwright sticks to a few main players, the nineteenth-century writer exploits to the hilt what a modern ecological fiction would look like: a sprawling mix—always picturesque, often grotesque—of human creatures drawn from all walks of life, each with his or her own values and dialects, comprising (when seen together) the ultimate target of the text: London.

But the more potent ecological thrust of Dickens's vision has to do with the interdependence of this mass of people, an interdependence that constitutes the veritable backbone of Dickensian plot—a schema for showing how related and bound to one another all these folks turn out to be. Dickens's characters, like most human subjects, think of themselves as individuals, as contoured creatures with a measure of agency. And some of his characters, such as the aristocratic Sir Leicester Dedlock, assume a great deal more still: their social and economic station, shored up by Victorian class arrangements, confers a form of natural protection and independence to them, making them "lords" in all senses of the term, with unlimited power, but without vulnerability. They have, one might say, immunity. It hardly needs saying that this mind-set was a common one in nineteenth-century European culture, and it is still going strong today.

In an ecological fiction, precisely this atomic mind-set is targeted, and if the fiction is sufficiently virulent, the individualist ethos is blown sky-high. Dickens is out to show us, in his own way, that all immune systems are fictive. Pollution and disease bring bad news to the Dedlocks, not simply by dint of exposing Lady Dedlock's sexual liaison with Nemo, but rather more massively, in terms of a storming of the fortress, an onslaught against all their pretensions of haughty independence. They will be assaulted in their most cherished belief: that they are "un-

touchable." In the Dedlock worldview, and indeed in the worldview of complacent London assumptions, there can be no connection between the aristocratic stronghold, Chesney Wold, and the disease-ridden slum at the core of the city and at the core of the novel, Tom-all-Alone's. But the wind blows in Dickens's novel, sovereignly traversing geographic and conceptual space, meshing all in its path. In one of the novel's most spellbinding passages, after telling us that Parliament loves to
talk
about reforming the slums while
doing
nothing at all, the author enunciates the new ecosystem at work, yielding a new social result: the community of disease: